The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work

Jerome Beker, Rivka Eisikovits

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135909376
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work presents and illustrates an anthropological model of child and youth care work and explores the associated benefits of such an approach. Author Rivka A. Eisikovits'model enhances workers'on-the-job effectiveness with clients and co-workers and improves intra- and inter-organizational communication with other human service providers. This book prepares child and youth care providers, educators, researchers, administrators, consultants, supervisors, and organizers to become change-sensitive, process-oriented observers, analysts, and co-designers of the systems within which they function and those with which they interact, such as families, communities, and referral agencies. The model presented in The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work offers readers an organic continuum between everyday work experience and conceptual practice, organizing such haphazard events into a systemized body of knowledge. Although providing specific skills, it is more than a technology--it is a humanistic worldview from which a humanistic practice philosophy can be derived. Specific points of this philosophy that child and youth care professionals learn about include:

• the cultural learning theory
• ethnographic inquiry and description
• staff-client relations
• the sick-role trap
• microcultural events in residential settings
• the relationship between treatment and education subsystems
• a heuristic approach to service delivery
• family cultural ethnography for cultural sensitizationEisikovits'anthropologic perspective broadens the horizons of child and youth care work and equips practitioners to transcend narrowly drawn organizational boundaries. By presenting caregivers as cultural translators between their clients and various decision-making forums, The Anthropology of Child and Youth Care Work prepares them to face the challenges of a dynamic emergent profession and helps them perform successfully in a rapidly changing social context that requires constant assessment of needs and evaluation of performance.

Chapter 1

An Anthropological Model for Child and Youth Care Worker Education and Practice

While I was doing anthropological fieldwork in a residential treatment center for delinquent and emotionally challenged adolescent girls, a unique relationship developed between myself and child and youth care workers in the setting. To better understand the culture of this institution I worked as a part-time youth counselor (local term for direct care worker) and communication consultant for the 18-month duration of the study. All participants, workers as well as clients, were aware of this research activity. The following excerpt from Eisikovits (1980, p. 159) is illustrative:

During the weekly team meetings, I would take a few minutes to read some of my field notes to the team members for correction and feedback. Here are some typical reactions:

“Is this really what we sound like?”
“Could all this make sense to an outsider?”
“Isn't that ridiculous how much time we spent on her?”
“He was speaking all the time, making all the decisions.”

Gradually they started using my field notes to evaluate their group process. These both stimulated them and provided that minimal distance necessary to contemplate their own actions.

This practice helped to reduce suspicion and to dissociate my note-taking from such activities as periodic peer reviews, which also took place during these meetings. The latter involved tape recording of sessions and had direct bearing on participants’ career advancement.

In spite of the incidental nature of their exposure to the anthropological perspective, these child and youth care workers came to recognize—or, rather, to intuit—its practice-enhancing potential. This, in turn, prompted a more thorough investigation of the rapprochement on my part, to try to explain why the anthropological “lenses” fit practitioners so naturally. Based on the exploration of similarities between these two professional worldviews, the anthropological model for child and youth care worker education and practice has been formulated.

The special relationship described above should be analyzed against the backdrop of negative or even hostile attitudes toward researchers that prevailed in the setting. These are widely shared by members of the child and youth care work community (see Beker & Baizerman 1982; Garduque & Peters, 1982; VanderVen, 1993). I learned about these residual feelings only inadvertently, from informal conversations with workers. Later I found out that some of these attitudes were transmitted from one generation of practitioners to the next as part of the peer-socialization process. The stereotypes persisted in spite of high staff turnover.

Located in the vicinity of several university and college campuses in a large metropolitan area, the setting served as a popular practicum placement for students in the human service professions. Its staff had ongoing involvement with various representatives of academia and tended to view research activities as investigator-oriented: “Those academics use the institution to satisfy their curiosity.” Their endeavors were regarded as exploitative and were often referred to as “hit-and-run” activities. “They come, or just send their assistants, have their questionnaires filled out, and vanish.”

One frequent complaint concerned the applicability of findings: “They don't care about our problems. Do they have to stay here and struggle with the everyday reality of working with kids?” Another pertained to the process of researchers feeding back their findings to the organization: “That is, when they bother to let us know about them [the findings] at all. Mostly they end up sending a brief report or a copy of some journal article, months or even years later. That, too, is kept up in the office. Never mind the time we wasted on the stupid project.”

Encounters with representatives of the evaluation research world seldom constituted positive experiences for these workers, either. Although topics may have been more relevant, these researchers’ presence usually connoted change and control. They tended to be called in by the administrative echelons “when things were not going all that well.” Cooperation with outside evaluators entailed answering probing questions, often without satisfactory assurances for safeguarding anonymity. Furthermore, workers were aware that the “implementation of findings,” whatever those might be, meant departure from their accustomed ways of doing things, which was inherently threatening.

Practitioners spend long hours with the residents and come to see the world from their perspective. This is an asset in that it enables them to form trusting and lasting relationships with their charges. At the same time it evokes in them antagonism toward a generalized, blanket category of “outsiders” that, in addition to researchers, includes representatives of various social welfare and counseling service organizations. What all these outsiders are considered to have in common is membership in groups invested with decision-making power over the future of young people whom only they, the direct care workers, claim to truly know (Durkin, 1990).

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND CHILD AND YOUTH CARE WORKERS

A comparison of the anthropologist's working style and way of reasoning in the traditional context of studying small scale tribal societies with the style and reasoning of child and youth care workers follows.

Anthropological Thinking in Cross-Paradigm Perspective

Anthropologists have traditionally done fieldwork in “exotic” societies about which little, if any, systematic knowledge was available. In order to come to understand their culture, the anthropologist had to piece together a mosaic of their life ways through a meticulous process of information gathering. This genre of research favors the mapping of an entire cultural unit—or, in anthropological terms, adopts a holistic approach to topics studied—before proceeding to the in-depth study of distinctive domains (Dobbert, 1982; Wolcott, 1990). This is quite different from the more common route taken by social scientists working within the neopositivist paradigm (Kerlinger, 1989; Newman, 1994) who study various aspects of their own society. Based on a working knowledge of the culture, they can use standardized instruments or methods and are able to formulate or test hypotheses concerning focused research interests.

Neopositivist social researchers and anthropologists also use different criteria for evaluating the nature of scientific truth. While the former look for an absolute and objective TRUTH, verifiable and replicable given the use of the “proper” scientific methods, the latter's interest lies in uncovering the multiplicity of their informants’ subjective “truths,” which are believed to be rooted in these individuals’ personal and cultural histories.

Different value orientations toward the populations studied guide investigators within these two research paradigms. Those following the neopositivist tradition maintain a stance of affective neutrality and view themselves as outsiders to their research ventures. Anthropologists, on the other hand, consider themselves immersed in their studies and recognize their influence on and commitment to its results. All documented positions expressed by informants are accepted as “legitimate”; the ethnographer's role is to record them and attempt to understand or interpret them within their own cultural context.

The experience acquired through working with foreign cultures makes anthropologists respectful of diversity. Cross-cultural wisdom has taught them that there are different ways to achieve similar or equivalent goals, none more valid than the other by absolute or universal standards. These are regarded as adaptive strategies devised by people to suit their needs. In other words, ethnographic fieldworkers embrace a stance of cultural relativism.

The fieldwork experience. The ability to ask pertinent questions is believed to develop in the course of long term, intimate association with the members of a culture, through learning the local language, basic life routines, the group's social structure, and the meanings attributed to cultural events. This intimate involvement is expected to socialize the fieldworker to do and see things the local way. In other words, how an anthropologist thinks and the questions he or she asks are, to a great extent, determined by the historical circumstances under which the “pioneers” of the profession carried out their fieldwork. The attitudes formed in that process left their imprint on the philosophy of the discipline and the professional ethics of its practitioners.

The ethnographer assumes the stance of the culture learner guided by the “natives” throughout the exploration. Knowledge is acquired through the eclectic use of a number of research tools, such as participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and the collection of life histories. To obtain a variety of insiders’ viewpoints on a cultural phenomenon and also as a validity check on the fieldworker's own insights, a large number of informants representing different social positions are contacted. These interviews yield a multi-layered cultural narrative.

Life in the field also teaches ethnographers to diagnose their personal biases, record their own feelings and distinguish between the descriptive, analytic, and interpretive layers of their inquiry (Wolcott, 1994). By so doing, they become sensitive, self-aware human research instruments.

Culture: Ecological and cognitive definitions. Culture, anthropology's seminal concept, has been given numerous definitions.¹ I bring here two definitions that are instrumental for developing an anthropological approach to child and youth care work. From an ecological standpoint, culture is an adaptive mechanism that a population develops over time to adjust to its physical—or material—and social environment. From a cognitive stance, a group's culture can be envisioned as a set of rules, norms, and values, or a mental road map to follow (Spradley, 1972).

While the ecological definition links the notion of culture to a territory, the cognitive one places it in people's heads. Knowledge becomes the stuff of culture, and a group of people with such shared knowledge—a culture. This distinction helps clarify why any human collective's way of life becomes accessible to people who were not born into it only as a system of ideas they can learn.

Cognitive cultures and their members. The emphasis on knowledge makes it possible to conceive of professional groups, such as physicians, teachers, and child care workers, and of organizations and their subsystems, like hospitals and wards, schools and classrooms, day and residential treatment centers and cottages within them, and even of families as cultural units. They each have exclusive knowledge, overt and covert symbols, a unique structure, and rules for new members to join. A cultural approach to small groups justifies the use of anthropological theory and methods for their analysis.

Membership in such cognitive cultures entails the assumption of several identities simultaneously. For example, adults may have a professional, a political, and a family identity, to name only a few. Youngsters may have one identity in the classroom, a second in their peer-group culture, and a third in their family context. Youth in residential care are likely to have even more cultural affiliations. The ability to manage these memberships becomes a measure of one's adaptation in complex, modern societies. In certain cases there is a consonance in norms and values between these reference groups. For instance, a young married male physician counts on his family to accept his long absences and to support the intensive time investment in his career during his residency years, in the hope of trade-offs from his professional success in the future.

However, people are often expected to function in contexts with discrepant demands. Young people in residential care are likely to belong to the latter category, with potential tension among program, peer group, and family expectations. This is equally true of child and youth care workers, who are also torn between the dictates of clashing identities that demand full availability for emotionally charged work with clients (Maier, 1990) and long shifts that keep them away from their families yet leave them with the frustration and financial burden of an insufficiently remunerated job (Ferguson, 1993). The situation is often further complicated by workers’ attempts to pursue academic studies in child and youth care concomitantly with their work (Ferguson, 1990).

The culture of child and youth care organizations. The residential treatment center as well as other child and youth care settings can be considered as cultures from both an ecological and cognitive standpoint. Territorially bounded, their mandate is derived from needs created by the larger cultural system of which they are a part. Their social mission is accomplished, at least in part, through the purposive design of their environment.

At the same time such organizations constitute cognitive cultural units with norms, values, social structures, symbol systems, and languages of their own. They can be subdivided into smaller entities based on members’ organizational or professional reference groups. According to the anthropological paradigm, all members of this culture—clients, child care workers, clinical staff, consultative and administrative staff, maintenance workers—are treated as informants without whom the study would not have been possible, rather than as “subjects.” Only through their willing cooperation can the investigator gain access to the kind of in-depth information that he or she seeks.

Transactions of meanings are at the core of all social interaction. This underscores the importance of uncovering the meaning-attribution processes operant in child and youth care settings, which are dynamic, negotiated systems based on the various inputs of their participants. Keeping this multiplicity distinctly in mind at all times is a formidable task.

Nevertheless, much like other small-scale cultures, these organizations tend to be intolerant of deviance because it threatens the integrity of their social fabric. They commonly uphold a normative ethos. Bringing about change in clients in clearly defined, often behaviorally specified ways is considered the raison d’être of many of these organizations. In the light of this and given the reality of multicultural client populations, highlighting the importance of cultural diversity in such environments cannot be overemphasized.

The degree of inclusiveness or exclusiveness of any definition of culture is established as a matter of convention among members of the community who share the definition. In other words, a child and youth care setting, residential or non-residential, can be treated as a cultural unit in and of itself when interest lies in analyzing its internal dynamics, interactive patterns, or climate. However, a more comprehensive definition will include the whole of the child and youth care service delivery field: policy makers, funding sources, socializing agents and institutions, and professional groups and their ideologies.

CULTURAL LEARNING THEORY

Cognitive and Interpersonal Approaches

Most studies of cultural learning draw an analytic distinction between people and their culture. Enculturation theory underlying these studies posits that learners absorb knowledge passively. Based on the analysis of ethnographic literature, Spindler (1975) offers a descriptive model of the mechanisms of culture transmission operant in the societies he has sampled. In this early but influential formulation (see Spindler, 1987, for a later position on this matter) he portrays the induction of neophytes into their culture as an interpersonal process.

According to this conceptualization, mechanisms of cultural “compression” and “decompression” are alternated in the process of socializing new members. Compression is expressed through the imposition of strict limitations on the initiate's socially approved behavioral options, until he or she can exhibit mastery of the rules of proper conduct. This is followed by a period of decompression, or a broadening of the acceptable behavioral repertoire, along with the allocation of social rights and responsibilities. This dialectic model envisions individuals’ progress from one of these role-learning contexts to the other as a compressive-decompressive cycle.

Gearing (1974) perceives cultural transmission/acquisition as a dynamic process of information flow that takes place in dyadic face-to-face interactions in the course of which “equivalences of meaning” are transacted between learners and socializing agents. Learning on both sides occurs as a result of post-encounter assessments of the parties’ expectations or “agendas.” While allotting an active part to learners, this model focuses on the social aspects of the process and disregards the environment as a source of learning. For this reason, these cognitive approaches cannot be considered holistic theories.

A Holistic Dynamic Approach

Over the last two decades a cross-cultural research team of educational anthropologists, of which I was a member, formulated and tested a theory of cultural learning (Dobbert, 1975; Dobbert & Eisikovits, 1984; Pitman, Eisikovits & Dobbert, 1989) based o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. An Anthropological Model for Child and Youth Care Worker Education and Practice
• Chapter 2. Ethnographic Description as a Vehicle for Child and Youth Care Worker Education
• Chapter 3. Staff-Client Relations: A Critical Analysis
• Chapter 4. A Comparative Study of Subsystem Relations in Two Child and Youth Care Organizations
• Chapter 5. Cultural and Futures Perspectives on the Residential Education Alternative
• Chapter 6. “Family Culture Ethnography” as an Instrument for Cultural Sensitization of Child and Youth Care Workers
• Concluding Remarks
• References